The Irish Famine

A water mould arrived from the Americas and destroyed Ireland's potato crop, the food of a third of the population, who ate it because it yielded more calories per acre than anything else on the small plots they had been left. Roughly a million died and a million emigrated. Throughout, Ireland exported food to Britain under armed guard — the crops were the landlords', and the government's commitment to letting markets work meant relief was limited and grudging. A crop failure became a catastrophe because of who owned the land and what the state believed about intervening.